“Women are beaten, just like men, but violence can be done to a woman.” Former prisoners in the USA talk about Ukrainian women held captive by the Russians

“Women are beaten, just like men, but violence can be done to a woman.”  Former prisoners in the USA talk about Ukrainian women held captive by the Russians


Two former prisoners, volunteer Ludmila Huseynova and medic Anna Olsen, spoke about how Ukrainians – prisoners of war and civilians – are treated in Russian captivity during meetings with representatives of the American authorities and in public discussions. They also called for the creation of a special mechanism for the release of Ukrainian civilians from captivity.

Huseynova and Olsen are in the US on a three-week advocacy trip organized by the NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights, a team of media workers specializing in human rights issues.

Lyudmila Huseynova, who stayed with her husband in the occupied territory of Donetsk region, spent more than a month in the infamous “Isolation” prison in Donetsk. She was detained in 2019 based on a report by city residents for her pro-Ukrainian position.

“I was there with a bag on my head almost the whole time. Even in the cell. The windows in the cell are smeared with white paint, you can’t see anything there, you don’t know what’s outside. At any rustling, any knocking on the door, I had to put on that package and turn to face the wall,” she says in an interview with “Voice of America”.

Huseynova says that she was forbidden to sit or lie down from 6 in the morning to 10 in the evening. All this time, the woman, who at that time was almost 60 years old, was forced to stand or walk around the cell.

“Somehow I got tired and a few minutes earlier climbed to the second floor to my bunks, they threw me down and beat me. There you constantly hear the screams of women and men who are being tortured,” Huseynova recalls.

Then, for more than three years, she was kept in a cell of the Donetsk SIZO together with criminals.

“I slept next to a stranger’s woman – one had tuberculosis, the other – some other disease. And you sleep on the same bunk. A hole in the floor covered with a cloth is a toilet. That’s where you wash, that’s where you wash the dishes after yourself,” the woman says.

Lyudmila Huseinova, who stayed with her husband in the occupied territory of Donetsk region, spent more than a month in the infamous “Isolation” prison, and then more than three years – in the Donetsk SIZO.

Last October, Ludmila was released as part of a women’s exchange. She came to the United States with Anna Olsen, a senior combat medic in the chemical and biological defense company of the 36th Separate Brigade of Marines, who is currently on temporary retirement. In April last year, the Olsen brigade, which was surrounded at the Illich plant in Mariupol and had almost a thousand wounded, surrendered after unsuccessful attempts to break through. The woman was imprisoned in Olenivka, Taganrog, Kursk, and the Belgorod region.

“The worst was in Taganrog, because it was in Taganrog that there was more physical and moral pressure, and not only pressure, but also torture,” Olsen said in an interview with Voice of America.

In the USA, Anna talks about the systematic nature of violations of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war by Russia – torture, refusal to provide medical care, psychological abuse, lack of food. They fed, she says, fresh porridge diluted with running water.

Both women say that the prisoners are no easier than the captured men, they are beaten no less. Olsen also adds that in Russian prisons, women are not only not provided with hygiene products, but often are not given the opportunity to wash.

“It’s normal for them not to take POWs swimming for more than a month – even for those three minutes under cold water,” Olsen recalls.

Lyudmila Huseynova says that she has not had a single meeting with her relatives in more than 3 years. Another woman with whom she was in the same cell, Olga Meleshchenko, has not seen her child for three years. Olga was accused of espionage.

“In fact, she liked something in support of Ukraine on the Internet. And there are a lot of such cases, there are a lot of such mothers. Women are beaten just like men, but a woman can be abused and it happens there. It is more difficult for a woman to go through all this psychologically, because there are children left behind. How these women’s hearts ache, how they howl at night for their children, that howl is scarier than screams from torture,” Huseynova says.

Thus, she believes, the Russians want to intimidate and destroy Ukrainian resistance. Olsen explains the particular brutality of the prison staff as a misunderstanding of the Ukrainians by the Russians.

“They don’t understand how it is possible to love one’s country so much that now servicemen are standing not for life, but for death. For them, this is nonsense,” she says.

Also, she believes, the propaganda that she was forced to watch while in prison has an influence.

“They do have stories on TV about how we can eat babies, how we abuse their military,” Olsen recalls.

Olsen explains the particular brutality of the prison staff as a misunderstanding of the Ukrainians by the Russians.

Olsen explains the particular brutality of the prison staff as a misunderstanding of the Ukrainians by the Russians.

In the USA, women are calling for the creation of a special mechanism for the release of civilians from Russian captivity.

“Under the Geneva Convention, military personnel are exchanged for military personnel, but there is no mechanism for exchanging civilians who are also in captivity,” Olsen explains.

Huseynova says that there are civilian men and women who have been held for 3-5 years, as well as those who have not been filtered in the occupied territories since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.

According to the Ukrainian authorities, at the end of last year, 3,400,400 Ukrainian citizens, both military and civilian, were in Russian captivity. Another 15 thousand are considered missing. As Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, told in an interview with “Voice of America”, about two thousand people have already been returned from Russian captivity. According to him, about 40% of those held hostage by the Russians are civilians.

“Russia is not ready to stop the practice of torture, as a result of which the military and civilians receive new injuries; Russia is not ready to hand over civilians, even if they have health problems or are quite old. There is no mechanism for the release of thousands of civilians, as the practice of exchanges under the Geneva Conventions does not apply to them,” Ukrinform quoted Tetyana Katrychenko, coordinator of the NGO “Media Initiative for Human Rights”, who accompanied Olsen and Huseynova on the trip, as saying.

She made the call to create a special platform for the release of civilian hostages during a hearing on gross human rights violations caused by Russian aggression against Ukraine at the UN headquarters in New York on February 22. All three participants of the advocacy trip took part in these hearings.

At the request of Voice of America, Nataliya Okhotnikova, a researcher at the ZMINA Human Rights Center, explained that the idea of ​​creating a separate mechanism for the release of civilian hostages remains a debatable topic. On the one hand, she says, current norms of international law do not regulate this issue. On the other hand, she points out, it is not so easy to get the new mechanism to work.

“As much as you want, you can oblige Russia to do or not do something, but in the absence of real levers of influence – and I am talking now exclusively about the legal mechanisms of responsibility of both the state and its individual helmsmen – any mechanism will not work,” she said in a written response to VOA.

Thus, says Okhotnikova, the new potential mechanism should take into account not only the principles of international law, but the mechanisms of forcing Russia to comply with them.

“And this is already the position of international organizations, how exactly to construct this mechanism,” the researcher notes.

According to Oleksandra Matviichuk, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize, head of the Center for Civil Liberties, “according to the 4th Geneva Convention, the Russians could not arbitrarily arrest civilians at all,” she wrote in a response to the Voice of America.

On November 12, 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a federal law on the withdrawal of ratification of the additional protocol to the Geneva Convention on the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts. But Russia remains a party to the Geneva Conventions, which include four treaties and three additional protocols.

Russian representatives claim that they are “liberating Ukraine” in their “special operation”, they blame Ukrainians for the death and suffering, or they deny evidence of war crimes. In particular, the President of the Russian Federation Putin called the evidence about the crimes in Buch “fake”.

The article uses information from “Suspilny”, UKRINFORM, Radio Liberty, NGO “Media Initiative for Human Rights”.



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